Memeorandum

June 29, 2015

I will guess that the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, while hardly a surprise, was not the best news for earnest Christians. This is from the Times:

The dramatic shift in public opinion [on gay marriage], and now in the nation’s laws, has left evangelical Protestants, who make up about a quarter of the American population, in an uncomfortable position. Out of step with the broader society, and often derided as discriminatory or hateful, many are feeling under siege as they try to live out their understanding of biblical teachings, and worry that a changing legal landscape on gay rights will inevitably lead to constraints on religious freedom.

No kidding. Too many Christians vote for Republicans so progressives will double down on labeling them as bigots and homophobic haters.

On the other hand, the scene in the Charleston courtroom at the bond hearing for Dylann Roof was a stunning display of Christian love, forgiveness and witness. Here is Times coverage and a recent description (in the context of taking down the Confederate flag):

And, in the country’s most churchgoing region, Christianity played a potent role. White worshipers described themselves as pained by guilt and moved beyond measure after watching relatives of the nine victims in Charleston deliver an unexpected message, distilling the essence of Christianity at a bond hearing for the suspect: We forgive.

Although theology is far outside my operating area, my thought is this: if a devout Christian florist or baker is asked to work for a gay wedding, maybe he (or she) could say something like "That is contrary to my religious beliefs and I hope you can respect my desire to refuse, but if you insist then I forgive you and will pray that God grant both of us a greater understanding of his message and his love". That would be a more elaborate version of "Love the sinner, hate the sin".

And just to complicate the issue - my impression is that celibate homosexuals are not considered to be sinners (I also glean this from the same Times article linked earlier). Now, people get married for all sorts of reasons, such as creating clarity for legal, insurance, real estate and adoptive issues. And I daresay that few in the homosexual community are getting married because they had forsworn pre-marital sex. So (this is a logical leap, but hardly Beamonesque), unless there is a concern that the newlyweds will have sex during the ceremony, any sinning is entirely hypothetical and not truly contingent upon the wedding ceremony which might will be happening for other reasons. In which case, getting married is not, in itself, sinful, nor is contributing to it.

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters last month that the memos about Libya she received while secretary of state from Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser whom the Obama administration had barred her from hiring, had been “unsolicited.”

But according to officials briefed on the matter, email records that Mrs. Clinton apparently failed to turn over to the State Department last fall show that she repeatedly encouraged Mr. Blumenthal to “keep ’em coming,” as she said in an August 2012 reply to a memo from him, which she called “another keeper.”

All or part of 15 Libya-related emails she sent to Mr. Blumenthal were missing from the trove of 30,000 that Mrs. Clinton provided to the State Department last year, as well as from the 847 that the department in turn provided in February to the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. The emails were reviewed by a reporter.

So she lied, sorry misremembered about her relationship with Sidney Blumenthal (who was trying to hustle Libya business for some contacts) and lied, what's with me, misremembered about the completeness of her email dump.

So, business as usual. This is only news for anyone who does not yet grasp Hillary's true nature. Nixon in a pantsuit.

In a case of life imitating art, the two killers who escaped from a prison in upstate New York in early June may have evaded capture for as long as they did with the help of an unlikely ingredient, authorities say.

Richard Matt and David Sweat, who broke out of the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility on June 6, may have used black pepper to throw off their scent from the dogs that were tracking them, Joseph D’Amico, superintendent for the New York State Police, told the Associated Press after authorities recovered Mr. Sweat’s DNA from a discarded pepper shaker at a camp where the fugitives may have spent time.

2. Let's give props to John Roberts, who was no doubt putting America's national security ahead of bickering over the meaning of obscure phrases such as "established by the state". With national health pinned down, Obama's thirst for a legacy may be quelled and his enthusiasm to sign on to a bad-and-getting-worse nuclear deal with Iran may ebb. After all, Obama already has a Nobel Peace Prizel, Libya, Syria, Iraq and the Ukraine notwithstanding. Of course, John Kerry is still looking for something to validate his life... Hey, why can't the Nobel people create a formal "Still Not George Bush" prize and give Kerry that? Just trying to think outside the box (but inside the ice cubes) here.

3. This one really cheered me up and I know it will give everyone a boost if I can ever remember it. Darn. So much for this idea.

June 24, 2015

NRO has an interesting give and take on the symbolic meaning of the Confederate battle flag. Here is Iraq war veteran David French:

Like many Southern boys, I grew up with two flags hanging in my room — an American flag and a Confederate battle flag. The American flag was enormous, taking up much of one wall. It was the “1776” flag, with 13 stars in a circle in the field of blue. My grandmother bought it for me on the bicentennial, and for years it was a treasured possession. The flag took on a special meaning later in life, when I learned more of a family history that included service with General Washington, suffering at Valley Forge.

The Confederate battle flag was much smaller, and it hung over my bookshelf. We bought it at the Shiloh battlefield in Tennessee, where one of my Confederate ancestors fought and where Albert Sidney Johnston died — the general that many considered the great hope of the Confederate Army in the West. My Confederate forefathers went on to fight at Vicksburg, at the battles of Franklin and Nashville, and in countless skirmishes across Tennessee and Mississippi. I grew up looking at old family pictures, including men who still wore their Confederate uniform for formal portraits — long after the war had ended.

So, family history and martial valor. However...

If the goal of our shared civic experience was the avoidance of pain, then we’d take down that flag. But that’s of course not the goal. Rather, we use history to understand our nation in all its complexity — acknowledging uncomfortable realities and learning difficult truths.

...

It is telling that the South’s chosen, enduring symbol of the Confederacy wasn’t the flag of the Confederate States of America — the slave state itself — but the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee’s army. Lee was the reluctant Confederate, the brilliant commander, the man who called slavery a “moral and political evil,” and the architect — by his example — of much of the reconciliation between North and South. His virtue grew in the retelling — and modern historians still argue about his true character — but the symbolism was clear. If the South was to rebuild, it would rebuild under Lee’s banner.

Since that time, the battle flag has grown to mean many things, including evil things. Flying it as a symbol of white racial supremacy is undeniably vile, and any official use of the flag for that purpose should end, immediately. Flying it over monuments to Confederate war dead is simply history. States should no more remove a Confederate battle flag from a Confederate memorial than they should chisel away the words on the granite or bulldoze the memorials themselves.

Whether you think it’s all right for South Carolina to fly a Confederate battle flag over a Confederate memorial on its capitol grounds depends on whether you think that the Confederate war dead should be honored. If you do, then you can, as David French does, see the flag as a symbol of their valor and skill while decrying its use by white supremacists.

This strikes me as a whitewash of both the flag and the Confederacy. The Confederacy was a rebellion founded on the incoherent idea that the sovereign authority of the United States might be shucked off at the states’ pleasure, and the Confederacy’s primary reason for being was to preserve racial slavery — that is, to violate natural rights rather than to secure them. That is what Confederate soldiers fought for. Whatever else their battle flag may mean, it has to mean that. It did not become a banner of white supremacy in the mid 20th century when racial segregationists took it up. It was a banner of white supremacy, and of lawlessness, from the beginning.

Reihan Salan reviews the history and comes away suggesting that the use of the flag morphed from honoring the Confederate veterans and dead to resisting the civil rights movement of the 50's and 60's. This is from a study he excerpted:

From the end of the Civil War until the late 1940s, display of the battle flag was mostly limited to Confederate commemorations, Civil War re-enactments, and veterans’ parades. The flag had simply become a tribute to Confederate veterans. It was during that time period, only thirty years after the end of the war and fifty years before the modern civil rights movement, that Mississippi incorporated the battle flag into its own state flag – well before the battle flag took on a different and more politically charged meaning.

In 1948, the battle flag began to take on a different meaning when it appeared at the Dixiecrat convention in Birmingham as a symbol of southern protest and resistance to the federal government – displaying the flag then acquired a more political significance after this convention. Georgia of course, changed its flag in 1956, two years after Brown v. Board of Education was decided. In 1961, George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, raised the Confederate battle flag over the capitol dome in Montgomery to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Civil War. The next year, South Carolina raised the battle flag over its capitol. In 1963, as part of his continued opposition to integration, Governor Wallace again raised the flag over the capitol dome. Despite the hundredth anniversary of the Civil War, the likely meaning of the battle flag by that time was not the representation of the Confederacy, because the flag had already been used by Dixiecrats and had become recognized as a symbol of protest and resistance. Based on its association with the Dixiecrats, it was at least in part, if not entirely, a symbol of resistance to federally enforced integration. Undoubtedly, too, it acquired a racist aspect from its use by the Ku Klux Klan, whose violent activities increased during this period. However, it is important to remember that in spite of these other uses, there remained displays of the battle flag as homage to the Confederate dead, with no racist overtones.

Well. At the risk of a Godwin's Law violation, I would note that German history is complicated and many Germans fought valiantly and honorably during WWII. But despite its long history of other meanings we don't see Nazi flags at German war cemeteries, and, although tributes to conventional German soldiers are within bounds, the politics of a cemetery which includes the Waffen SS are deeply fraught.

People who wanted to reserve the battle flag for honoring the soldiers of the Civil War should have piped up when that flag was politicized by the leaders of the retrograde South. They're a bit late now.

June 23, 2015

Ever since the 2012 election, events keep transpiring that seem to vindicate Mitt Romney and his campaign. Googling "Mitt Romney was right about everything" shows articles from Politico, the Washington Post, Buzzfeed, CNN, and on and on and on. From Russia as the number one geopolitical foe, to the woes of implementing Obamacare, to Detroit going bankrupt - well, there's certainly evidence to make the case.

Let's call this one the umpty-bumpth item on the list, to use official JOM lingo.

ROMNEY: Our Navy is old -- excuse me, our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We're now at under 285. We're headed down to the low 200s if we go through a sequestration. That's unacceptable to me.

I want to make sure that we have the ships that are required by our Navy.

And just like Obama did in responding to Romney's statements on Russia - he countered this Romney statement with . . . a joke:

You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships.

Faced with a shortage of U.S. Navy ships, the Marine Corps is exploring a plan to deploy its forces aboard foreign vessels to ensure they can respond quickly to global crises around Europe and western Africa.

The initiative is a stopgap way to deploy Marines aboard ships overseas until more American vessels are available, said Brig. Gen. Norman Cooling, deputy commander, U.S. Marine Corps Forces Europe and Africa. [...]

The U.S. Navy has 30 amphibious ships but says it needs 38 to fulfill war fighting requirements. It won't reach that level until 2028 because of budget constraints, according to the Navy.

Obama is going to be madder than anyone just as soon as he finds out about this in news reports.

Look, I'm just going to throw this out there: maybe - just maybe - having a community organizer as the Commander in Chief isn't the greatest idea.

June 22, 2015

For the umpty-bumpth time I am reminded that i will never be smart enough to be a progressive. After years of wrestling with the notion that, contra science and biology, race is a social construct, I am now informed by our President that here in America, racism is "part of our DNA".

Of course, he also said that racism has not been "cured", so either he is advocating for breakthroughs in gene therapy or this is another failed metaphor.

JUST GRUMBLING, or, WADDYA MEAN "WE", BLACK MAN? I am strangely certain that when Obama says that racism is in "our DNA" he doesn't mean his DNA. And certainly not Michelle's. But since I am Anglo-Irish, yeah, I am surely included in Obama's DNA racism range. Whatever. I guess I'd feel worse if I could help myself, but having been born this way...

Stephanie Armour of the WSJ reports on emails between Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber and team Obama:

MIT Economist Jonathan Gruber Had Bigger Role in Health Law, Emails Show

Adviser whose comments on Affordable Care Act touched off a furor worked more closely than previously known with White House

Yeah, yeah, fun's fun but... with the Supreme Court expected to release their opinion on the validity of the Obamacare subsidies any day now, a real clickbait headline would have revealed that Gruber and the White House had exchanged emails confirming that Federal subsidies could only go to states that set up their own exchanges. Gruber was repeatedlycaught on tape saying just that, but an email with the White House would widen the circle of ex post denial and politically convenient amnesia.

Presumably Ms. Armour knows all this. So, as with the curious incident of the dog in the night, one might infer that no such smoking email was found. Drat.

June 21, 2015

The Times looks at the government database hacking debacle and includes this gem:

In congressional testimony and in interviews, officials investigating the breach at the personnel office have struggled to explain why the defenses were so poor for so long. Last week, the office’s director, Katherine Archuleta, stumbled through a two-hour congressional hearing. She was unable to say why the agency did not follow through on inspector general reports, dating back to 2010, that found severe security lapses and recommended shutting down systems with security clearance data.

When she failed to explain why much of the information in the system was not encrypted — something that is standard today on iPhones, for example — Representative Stephen F. Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat who usually supports Mr. Obama’s initiatives, snapped at her. “I wish that you were as strenuous and hardworking at keeping information out of the hands of hackers,” he said, “as you are keeping information out of the hands of Congress and federal employees.”

Maybe the House committee on government oversight should reach out to the Chinese and see if they can give us the Lois Lerner emails.

Timesman Ross Douthat is more interesting than the rest of the Times columnists put together. The obvious explanation - as a righty writing for a lefty publication, he actually has to appeal to a wider range of intellectual viewpoints. Today's column on the pope is fascinating:

IN Pope Francis’ sprawling new encyclical, “Laudato Si’,” there are many mansions: A meditation on biblical ecology, a discussion of environmental policy, a critique of consumerism, even a reflection on the perils of social media.

What everyone wants to know, of course, is whether the pope takes sides in our most polarizing debate. And he clearly does. After this document, there’s no doubting where Francis stands in the great argument of our time.

But I don’t mean the argument between liberalism and conservatism. I mean the argument between dynamists and catastrophists.

On Wednesday Hillary Clinton called for a national conversation confronting the "hard truths" about race, guns and violence.

On Saturday in San Francisco, Hillary said "Let's be honest" about race. She is hardly the first politician to preface her prevarications with that phrase, but her shamelessness remains unsurprising.

“Our problem is not all kooks and Klansmen. It’s also the cruel joke that goes unchallenged. It’s the offhand comment about not wanting those people in the neighborhood,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Let’s be honest, for a lot of well meaning, open-minded white people, the sight of a young black man in a hoodie still evokes a twinge of fear.”

Secondly, Obama was quick to throw his own grandmother under the bus to personalize this point when he made it during the 2008 campaign.

So why doesn't Hillary confront some hard truths and be honest with us? Surely she considers herself to be a "well meaning, open-minded" white person. Does she also feel that twinge of fear she is comfortable ascribing to many of the rest of us? Or have her decades within a Secret Service protective bubble inured her to the possibility of street crime?

And call me classist, but how many "well meaning, open-minded" white people feel a twinge of fear when they see a young white man with jeans, a denim jacket, prison tats, and the rest of the Hell's Angels / Justified crystal meth look? Hmm, does Hillary realize that a tattoo can adversely impact one's professional prospects? Dare I wonder, if a person presents himself in a way that suggests he has rejected some mainstream norms, is it fair to wonder whether he holds a mainstream view on non-violence to random strangers?

And does context count? Speaking for myself, if I see either a young black man in a hoodie or a Hells Angel wanna-be on the not-so-mean streets of my suburban enclave, that person is out of place and more of a cause for concern than the typical dogwalker or middle-aged jogger I have learned to expect. But in Central Park on a Sunday afternoon? That's what makes New York the greatest city in the world.

I am sure Hillary would love to expand on her thoughts here, and continue her lecture on why "lots" of the rest of us are racist haters.

June 20, 2015

This article on the improvements in treating heart attacks is fascinating. A lot of the improvement did not require breakthrough drugs or technology, but involved doing some (relatively) simple and well-understood things more quickly.

With no new medical discoveries, no new technologies, no payment incentives — and little public notice — hospitals in recent years have slashed the time it takes to clear a blockage in a patient’s arteries and get blood flowing again to the heart.

Hospitals across the country have adopted common-sense steps that include having paramedics transmit electrocardiogram readings directly from ambulances to emergency rooms and summoning medical teams with a single call that sets off all beepers at once.

Wave the time/motion experts on stage for a bow!

And yes, this isn't brain surgery, although the neurologists are taking notice:

The improvements in treatment have spilled over into the care of stroke victims. Neurologists watched with envy as cardiologists slashed their times. For strokes, too, the time it takes to be treated with the clot-dissolving drug tPA is of the essence. “Time is brain,” neurologists say. They began to copy the cardiologists.

“Seeing that someone else could do it was remarkably motivating and a little bit competitive,” said Dr. Lee H. Schwamm, the chief of stroke services at Massachusetts General Hospital. “If they can do it, why can’t we?”

June 18, 2015

Yahoo News, of all places, has put together a very well-done summary and tribute to the people who were gunned down in Charleston, SC last night while attending a prayer meeting. Please let me highlight something for each person, but the piece by Michael Walsh deserves a click and a full and thoughtful read.

Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, a reverend at the church, was also one of the shooting victims.

The 45-year-old mother of three coached the girls’ track team at Goose Creek High School in Goose Creek, S.C.

Cynthia Hurd

Cynthia Hurd, 54, the manager of St. Andrews Regional Library, was remembered as a woman who spent her life making sure residents of the local community had the opportunities for personal growth and an education. ...

DePayne Middleton Doctor

Former Charleston County employee DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49, was among the victims. ...

Allen University identified alumnus Tywanza Sanders, 26, as one of the victims, WACH reported. ...

In a statement from the university, Sanders was remembered as "a quiet, well known student who was committed to his education. He presented a warm and helpful spirit as he interacted with his colleagues.”

Myra Thompson

Denise Quarles confirmed to "Good Morning America" that her mother, Myra Thomspon, 59, had died but declined to comment further.

Ethel Lee Lance

Ethel Lee Lance, 70, was a sexton who reportedly worked at the church for more than 30 years.

Daniel L. Simmons

Simmons was a retired pastor from another church in Charleston and attended the Emanuel AME Church's services every Sunday and Bible study every Wednesday, she said.

Susie Jackson

Charleston County Coroner Rae Wooten confirmed that the other victims were longtime church member Susie Jackson, 87.

Mr. Obama, despite warnings of Mr. Maliki’s intentions, made no sincere effort to leave a sizable number of troops in Iraq past 2011. Now we’re sending in tiny groups, a few hundred at a time, to live on lily pads. That’s no way to instill the will to fight, yet Pentagon officials brag about numbers of “troops trained.”

Before entering ground combat, we have to fix the political problem. It would be insane to repeat our previous mistake and train an army to fight for the current Shiite government. Last year we trained not a single Sunni soldier, and our dollars continue to flow through Baghdad to Shiite militias.

...

Even with a thousand American advisers, Shiite soldiers today won’t fight for desolate Sunni lands. If we’re committed to a yearslong effort, money should flow directly to the end recipient of our choosing — whether that be the Iraqi Army, Kurds or Sunni tribesmen. Our current half-strategy opposes one enemy — the Islamic State — but benefits a much bigger threat, Iran.

If we don’t get the politics aligned with a commitment to destroy the Islamic State, our advisers should expect the same heartbreak as those of us who fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and our fathers before us in Vietnam.

June 17, 2015

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that Russia's plan to buy more intercontinental ballistic missiles was concerning and could herald a return to the international hostility of the "Cold War."

Speaking at a military and arms fair on Tuesday, Russia President Vladimir Putin announced the addition of 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles which, he said, were able to overcome "even the most technically advanced anti-missile defense systems."

...

Kerry said that, since the 1990s, there had been "enormous cooperation" in the destruction of nuclear weapons that were in the former territories of the Soviet Union.

No one wants to see us step backwards, nobody wants to, I think, go back to a kind of Cold War status," he added.

One might have thought that imagining that it can't happen can lead to a situation where it does happen. But maybe "Peace Through Strength" was just more Cold War nonsense brilliantly rebutted by the "Peace Through Unilateral Disarmament" crowd. Maybe!

June 16, 2015

The facts vs. David Brooks: Startling inaccuracies raise questions about his latest book

Factual discrepancies in the NYT columnist's new book raise some alarming questions about his research & methods

Spoiler alert - we can all exhale, this is not that alarming. Still...

For at least the past four years David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, TV pundit, bestselling author and lecture-circuit thought leader, has been publicly talking and writing about humility. Central to his thesis is the idea that humility has waned among Americans in recent years, and he wants us to harken to an earlier, better time.

One of the key talking points (if not the key talking point) cited by Brooks in lectures, interviews, and in the opening chapter of his current bestseller, “The Road to Character,” is a particular set of statistics — one so resonant that in the wake of the book’s release this spring, it has been seized upon by a seemingly endless number of reviewers and talking heads. There’s just one problem: Nearly every detail in this passage – which Brooks has repeated relentlessly, and which the media has echoed, also relentlessly — is wrong.

David Zweig was exploring similar humilty-related themes when he came across this factoid from a David Brooks talk a few years back:

In 1950 the Gallup Organization asked high school seniors “Are you a very important person?” And in 1950, 12 percent of high school seniors said yes. They asked the same question again in 2006; this time it wasn’t 12 percent, it was 80 percent.

But diligent fact-checking could not confirm that detail, so Zweig did not use it himself. But Brooks did, in 2015!

The passage from “The Road to Character” reads:

“In 1950, the Gallup Organization asked high school seniors if they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was asked in 2005, and this time it wasn’t 12 percent who considered themselves very important, it was 80 percent.”

And oddly, a thematically similar point had been made in Brook's own 2011 "The Social Animal":

The passage from “The Social Animal” reads:

“In 1950 a personality test asked teenagers if they considered themselves an important person. Twelve percent said yes. By the late 1980s, 80 percent said yes.”

So Brooks forgot his own book and his own factcheckers don't re-reread his own stuff. Color me disappointed, but hardly horrified. But if Zweig is right I am under-reacting:

Somehow, between the publication of “The Social Animal” in 2011 and the publication of “The Road to Character” in 2015, a study that originally occurred, by Brooks’ telling, in “the late 1980s” became one that occurred nearly 20 years later. (Amazingly, to the New York Times reviewer, the late 1980s and 2005 are only “slightly different dates.” And how was any difference in dates for the same citation, no matter how “slight,” not problematic to the Times reviewer?)

What began as a simple fact-check of a Gallup poll was devolving into a morass.

Zweig contacts Brooksies people, eventually is offered a research paper by Newsom, Archer et al as a citation, and contacts the authors. The gist - Brooks wasn't so wrong in The Social Animal" but was deeply wrong in "The Road To Perdition Character":

The thing I keep wondering is how did Brooks get nearly every detail of this passage wrong? He said Gallup did the polls, when they were actually done by academics. He merged a data set from 1948 and 1954 into 1950. He said the second data set was from 2005, when it was from 1989 (to me, the most damning and damaging inaccuracy). He said it was high school seniors, when it was ninth graders. And he said 80 percent answered true, when that was only so for boys. Can one accidentally get this many details wrong?

So the question is, if it wasn’t an accident, why would Brooks deliberately falsify nearly every detail in a passage of his book, let alone one that is a cornerstone of the book’s P.R. campaign?

Why would Brooks deliberately falsify this whole factoid? Is that really the obvious next question? I would ruminate on the fraility of human memory before I assumed Brooks to be lying.

Speaking of which, and filed under "everything new is old again", here is an aggrieved blogger from 2011:

Back in March David Brooks titled one of his New York Times columns “The Modesty Manifesto.” In it, he argued that over the course of a few generations American culture has shifted from an emphasis on self-effacement to one on self-enlargement — in short, that Americans now hold themselves, as individuals, in much higher regard than they once did.

You see this freight train coming, don't you?

However, one item from his column that Mr. Brooks keeps repeating on the lecture and interview circuits is more sinister. He cites polling data showing that in the 1950s 12% of American high school seniors said they were “a very important person” and that by the 1990s a whopping 80% believed that they were. Leaving aside the fact that Brooks keeps changing the date for that 80% figure (sometimes he says it’s from polling done in the 1990s, sometimes from 2005), Brooks is refusing to look under the surface of this seemingly alarming number.

Hmm. So even back in 2011 Brooks was muddling his dates on the stump, if not in print. The Modesty Manifesto column from 2011 says this:

In a variety of books and articles, Jean M. Twenge of San Diego State University and W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia have collected data suggesting that American self-confidence has risen of late. College students today are much more likely to agree with statements such as “I am easy to like” than college students 30 years ago. In the 1950s, 12 percent of high school seniors said they were a “very important person.” By the ’90s, 80 percent said they believed that they were.

Hmm, right that time! And in July 2010, in the course of berating the narcissistic Mel Gibson, Brooks offers the same cite for the same factoid:

In their book, “The Narcissism Epidemic,” Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell cite data to suggest that at least since the 1970s, we have suffered from national self-esteem inflation. They cite my favorite piece of sociological data: In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves an “important person.” Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes.

I Boldly Infer that Twenge et al were the source of this tidbit for Brooks. A diligent reader can Look Inside and find it on p. 35 here, or check this cool screenshot:

So why is Salon author Zweig contacting professors Newsom and Archer? Because they are the citation offered by Twenge (e.g., in this Journal of Personality 76:4, August 2008 paper, "Egos Inflating Over Time: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory", p. 878). Rather than blaming Brooks for moving a 1948 survey into the 1950s and muddling boys with girls, one might take it up with Twenge. (And FWIW, Twenge reverses the 80% / 77% boy-girl breakdown provided by Zweig, and if I had a copy of the Newsom paper I would gleefully adjudicate that dispute. And do, see UPDATE.)

Still, one wonders how Gallup got involved and why the second study keeps getting moved into 2005. Let me compound the mystery - here is a blogger from 2007 describing "Fame Junkies", published in 2007 by former factchecker, New Republic and NPR writer Jake Halpern:

"American teenagers are the most narcissistic people in the world."

That conclusion comes from a study published in Jake Halpern's new bookFame Junkies, The Hidden Truths behind Americas Favorite Addiction.

Last night I went to see him do a reading at a local bookstore. He talked about how in the 1950's 12% of American teens answered yes to the question "Are you an important person?" In 2006, that number jumped to over 80%.

Well, that is one fanboy heard from, but did Halpern really say that? I wasn't there, but in the book (Look Inside p. 35 - that page is not presented, but searches on "important person" confirm the factoid's presence) he cites the 2006 "Generation Me" by Twenge, and in the press release he offers this:

Are teenagers in America really more self-important than they were in the past?

There is certainly information to support this notion. This piece of data is my favorite. It comes from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. This personality test has been given to teenagers since the early 1950s. If you compare the results from teenagers who took the test in the early 1950s to results from teenagers who took it in the late 1980s, it's quite interesting. One of the most striking differences between these two groups was the way they responded to item 58, which reads: "I am an important person." In the early 1950s, only 12 percent of teenagers endorsed that statement; by the late 1980s, that number had jumped to roughly 80 percent.

This is everybody's favorite factoid! If I had to guess, I would wager that Halpern mentioned a 2006 book citing a study from the 1950s and late 80s, and the blogger dropped the 80s figure. I would further wager that Our Guy Brooks remembers the 2006 book and is making the same mistake on the dates.

So how did Gallup get in the mix? Beats me. On August 31 2011 on C-SPAN, Brooks cited Gallup, contra his then-recent book. In 2010, at a talk in Asheville, Gallup was in the story, and the second survey was "last year":

“It occurred to me that this is a shift in our culture,” he said. “In 1950, a Gallup poll asked teenagers ‘Are you an important person?’ and 12% said yes. Last year, 80% said yes. That’s a shift in culture."

But why Gallup? Another unsolved mystery. There is a Gallup Youth Survey which was founded in 1977, and in a head as packed with factoids as Mr. Brooks, some cross-wiring may have occurred (yet again, more information equals less knowledge).

I would opine that Brooks is obviously confused, his factcheckers are either overworked or underpaid, and Zweig is a bit too excited about his "gotcha". As Mark Twainmighthave said, "It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so."

UPDATE: Don't seek and ye shall find - in the course of looking for something else I stumbled upon the full Newsom paper, which has something for everyone:

In the 1950s, this item, placed on the ego inflation (Ma4) subscale, was endorsed as true by only about 12% of the Hathaway and Monachesi (1963) sample. In contrast, this item was endorsed as true by 77% (girls) to 80% (boys) of contemporary adolescents. The dramatic shift in endorsement frequency probably reflects a fundamental shift in the connotation of this item, that is, in the Hathaway era this item was likely interpreted by adolescents as related to self-aggrandizement, whereas it is seen as reflective of positive aspects of self-esteem by modern adolescents.

So 1948 is culturally repackaged into 'the 1950s' here and down the line, But for some reason, Prof. Twenge reversed the boy/girl split.

And of course, when a 2003 paper cites 1989 data to describe "contemporary adolescents", I suppose some confusion is possible. That said, the authors are crystal clear, several pages earlier, that the "contemporary" data is from the late 1980s:

The contemporary adolescent sample is comprised of the 805 boys and 815 girls collected in the late 1980s to create the MMPI–A adolescent norms.

June 15, 2015

Divisive Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal will testify before the House Select Committee on Benghazi Tuesday as part of the same congressional probe that uncovered Hillary Clinton's use of a private email and server to hide her records at the State Department.

What is the committee looking at regarding Blumenthal?

Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., told the Washington Examiner Tuesday's interview will focus on uncovering the details of how and why Blumenthal obtained intelligence in Libya.

"The committee's interest in Mr. Blumenthal is based on a large number of emails regarding Libya to former Secretary Clinton," said Westmoreland, who is a member of the select committee. "We are looking for the facts: the depth of his involvement, why he had this information, who gave it to him, etc."

A batch of Benghazi-related emails between Clinton and her staff that were published last month revealed the significant influence Blumenthal wielded over Clinton when she led the State Department.

Perhaps because I am more cynical on Mondays than the rest of the week, here's a Bold Prediction: Blumenthal's testimony will mostly mirror Hillary Clinton's infamous Benghazi testimony: "What difference, at this point, does it make?"

And that will pretty much be that.

IF I WERE ON THE SELECTION JURY: Sarah Westwood would be a nominated finalist for a Pulitzer in investigative journalism for her work on the Watchdog Team at the Washington Examiner. Her work is absolutely fantastic.

June 13, 2015

WASHINGTON — An internal State Department assessment paints a dismal picture of the efforts by the Obama administration and its foreign allies to combat the Islamic State’s message machine, portraying a fractured coalition that cannot get its own message straight.

The assessment comes months after the State Department signaled that it was planning to energize its social media campaign against the militant group. It concludes, however, that the Islamic State’s violent narrative — promulgated through thousands of messages each day — has effectively “trumped” the efforts of some of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations.

It also casts an unflattering light on internal discussions between American officials and some of their closest allies in the military campaign against the militants. A “messaging working group” of officials from the United States, Britain and the United Arab Emirates, the memo says, “has not really come together.”

The Brits are involved? So why can't the Dilbert-inspired messaging working group deliver a simple, inspiring oration such as "We shall fight on Twitter, we shall fight on Facebook, we shall fight in Instagram and Snapchat, we shall fight in Pinterest; we shall never surrender!"?

A bit more:

John Kirby, the State Department spokesman, said that the memo “acknowledges what we’ve made clear in the past: We must do a better job at discrediting ISIL in the information space.” Mr. Kirby was using an acronym for an alternate name for the group, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

I am not sure whether these multilateral messagers are receptive to coaching but here is a Pro Tip - maybe they could get their heads together and agree on a name for the enemy, hmm? As a start.

June 12, 2015

The authors, who have successfully rebutted an earlier NFL investigation, think the DeflateGate investigation was too flawed to conclude with reasonable confidence that the Patriots cheated. For example:

The Wells report’s main finding is that the Patriots balls declined in pressure more than the Colts balls did in the first half of their game, and that the decline is highly statistically significant. For the sake of argument, let’s grant this finding for now. Even still, it alone does not prove misconduct. There are, after all, two possibilities. The first is that the Patriots balls declined too much. The second — overlooked by the Wells report — is that the Colts balls declined too little.

The latter possibility appears to be more likely.

Apparently the Colts' balls were measured later during half-time, so they had more of a chance to warm to room temperature. Also, the refs were used two different gauges to initially inflate the balls before the game and then to re-check them at half-time. The gauges don't quite agree, so...

For example, there is considerable uncertainty concerning the actual pressure of the footballs. The N.F.L. official who checked the pressure before the game used some combination of two pressure gauges to measure the Patriots and Colts balls, but it is not known which particular combination.

One of the gauges, as the report notes, records pressures that are higher than the other. If the official used that gauge to measure the Patriots balls (but not the Colts balls) pregame, then those balls may well have started out with too little air, which could explain a later appearance of intentional deflation. The report, however, does not consider that possibility.

None of which proves the Patriots are as pure as the driven snow, but it creates what may seem like reasonable doubt. Or at least, give the Commissioner an excuse to cut Brady's penalty.

June 11, 2015

Obama is sending even more troops back to Iraq, and he may send more after that. Between this and the impending trade debacle, progressives must be wondering (not for the first time!) whatever happened to that nice anti-war chap they gushed for in 2008.

As to this new strategy, or whatever it is, the "lily pad" concept of multiple US bases is not the same as the "oil spot" strategy of focusing on civilian security in specific areas, with the goal of expanding those areas over time. Metaphorically, lily pads don't tend to grow (much), unlike spreading oil spots.

That said, no marketing maven would use an "oil-spot" label on a strategy for salvaging Iraq unless waving red flags at the "no blood for oil" crowd was part of the sales pitch. Stay with "ink spot".

Of course, if the strategy is to start in one place and expand over time, the White House could label this program "Operation Breaking Wind". Just trying to help...

On Tuesday there was a bit of a scare at the White House, but have no fear, the Secret Service was on the job. Wait. What?

On Tuesday, the White House briefing room was cleared in the middle of a press conference due to a bomb threat. The risk was managed by the Secret Service, despite many of the agents not having received national security clearance.

A Secret Service official told the Washington Post that four to five dozen officers lacked security clearances as of last week. A little more than two dozen of those were posted at the White House, the official said.

The Secret Service has been more than a little dysfunctional under President Obama, what with hookers and cocaine and people jumping the fence at the White House - and making it inside. You know, little stuff like that.

Here's a question - why is there such a backlog of agents without security clearances? The Free Beacon article takes us to the Secret Service itself for an answer:

Secret Service spokesman Brian Leary said Tuesday that Clancy has put additional administrative staff to work on the backlog and that all outstanding clearances will be issued by Friday.

The Secret Service has rushed to increase its security force since September, when a man hopped the fence guarding the White House lawn and broke into the first floor wielding a knife.

Security threats have increased since, pushing the Secret Service to speed up the placement process, including stationing officers in high security positions without the proper clearance.

So the problem seems to be that since the Secret Service was pretty lousy at its job, it needed to hire more agents because, having been lousy at its job, the threats have increased, leading to the problem of hiring and deploying agents who aren't even fully vetted which - and stay with me here - just might lead to further deterioration in the performance of the Secret Service.

I'm going to guess how this ends: the Secret Service will ask for more funding. There's no problem any federal government agency can't (claim to) solve if it is just given more money.

The Secret Service has put a senior supervisor on leave and suspended his security clearance after a female employee accused him of assaulting her after-hours at agency headquarters last week, the agency said Wednesday.

The D.C. police’s sex-crimes unit and a government inspector general are investigating the female agent’s allegation that Xavier Morales, a manager in the security clearance division, made unwanted sexual advances and grabbed her on the night of March 31 after they returned to the office from a party at a downtown restaurant, according to two law enforcement officials with knowledge of the probe.

So a scandal actually reached the security clearance division within the agency, and later the agency has trouble processing security clearances. Hey, I wonder if the two are related?

And in the "just might lead to further deterioration in the performance of the Secret Service" department, a Secret Service agent was just busted for hitting up a girl at a Michelle Obama speech and later using his cell phone in a not entirely appropriate manner:

A junior Secret Service agent is under fire after he reportedly exchanged numbers with a woman at an event co-hosted by Michelle Obama and later sent her lewd text messages.

The unnamed agent was at an event celebrating veteran caregivers held by former Senator Elizabeth Dole's non-profit when he hit on the 'prominent Washington, DC staffer,' reports the National Enquirer.

The young woman later received lewd texts offering her oral sex followed by photos of the agent in which he flashed his penis while still in the Secret Service uniform.

A "junior agent"? Hmm, I'm guessing he couldn't flash her his security clearance.

Well. The nation can empathize with President Obama to the extent he feels like those charged to protect him are a mix of corrupt and incompetent. Believe me, for going on six plus years now we can empathize with just that feeling.

June 10, 2015

WASHINGTON — As NATO faces a resurgent Russian military, a substantial number of Europeans do not believe that their own countries should rush to defend an ally against attack, according to a comprehensive survey to be made public on Wednesday.

NATO’s charter states that an attack against one member should be considered an attack against all, but the survey points to the challenges the alliance faces in trying to maintain its cohesion in the face of an increasingly aggressive Russia.

“At least half of Germans, French and Italians say their country should not use military force to defend a NATO ally if attacked by Russia,” the Pew Research Center said it found in its survey, which is based on interviews in 10 nations.

The French army mutinied in 1917, rolled over in 1940, and has not really answered the bell since then. As to the Germans, there is a backstory:

Germany, a critical American ally in the effort to forge a Ukraine peace settlement, was at the other end of the spectrum. Only 38 percent of Germans said that Russia was a danger to neighboring countries aside from Ukraine, and only 29 percent blamed Russia for the violence in Ukraine.

Consequently, 58 percent of Germans do not believe that their country should use force to defend another NATO ally. Just 19 percent of Germans say NATO weapons should be sent to the Ukrainian government to help it better contend with Russian and separatist attacks.

Support for the NATO alliance in Germany was tallied at 55 percent, down from 73 percent in 2009. Those results are influenced by Germans in the eastern part of the country, who are more than twice as likely as western Germans to have confidence in President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

And NATO really only needs a few patsies:

In the United States, the study notes, support for NATO remains fairly strong. Americans and Canadians, it says, were the only nationalities surveyed in which more than half of those polled believed that their country should take military action if Russia attacked a NATO ally.

June 06, 2015

I would like to highlight the Veterans History Project page devoted to D-Day, which includes interviews from soldiers who survived the Invasion of Normandy.

Allow me to give quick summary of one of these heroes.

Charles C. Woodring was drafted a year after he graduated high school. His basic training was cut short by two weeks in order for him to be deployed to England. On D-Day his job was to go in ahead of the troops to clear the barbed wire fencing along the beach. In the course of talking about his boat hit a mine on D-Day and having to swim several hundred yards to shore, Mr. Woodring describes having to inflate his life belt saying, "We didn't have Mae West." Later in the interview he says he will never, ever drive a Chrysler because the Germans tried to kill him. Mr. Woodring is a Silver Star recipient.

June 05, 2015

I suppose I can take credit - like 99.9% of the rest of the world - in claiming the IRS wasn't going to come a calling when it came to looking into the Clinton Foundation's tax exempt status. But when I did so, I made this crack:

That link goes to video of Hillary working a rope line by telling someone in line to go to the back of the line.

Well. Instead of Hillary treating the IRS that way - it appears it is the IRS treating members of Congress in this very fashion.

A House Republican called out the IRS on Thursday for sending her a form letter in response to concerns about the Clinton Foundation's tax exemption.

The IRS's response to Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) was addressed to "Sir or Madam," and the senior agency official who runs the tax-exempt division didn't sign it.

Yeah, yeah, the impersonal nature of addressing a Congresswoman in this manner is troubling. But more importantly, it is appalling in this day and age that even form letters can be so triggeringly microaggressive. How did the IRS know that the recipient of the letter would identify as a sir or a madam, and not one of the other 57 varieties of genderish identification?

The IRS got lucky that Ms. Blackburn was only outraged by the lack of urgency and by the agency on the matter at hand and the lack of "tact" in perfunctory nature of the letter, otherwise there might have been hell to pay. But this is Barack Obama's America where Congress is just an afterthought, so they will be relatively safe with their response. From the IRS letter:

The Internal Revenue Service has an ongoing examination program to ensure that exempt organizations comply with the applicable provisions of the Intern Revenue Code. The information you submitted will be considered in this program.

So, yeah, the IRS isn't interested in examining the Clinton Foundation. Back of the line for you, Ms. Blackburn! The sun also rose in the East this morning, and I can confirm that when I brushed my teeth earlier that the water was still wet.

The most we can hope for here is that someone at the IRS goes to sensitivity training.

This is probably not as well-known or oft talked about as it should be: during the period in which Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, at no time was a permanent, Senate-confirmed Inspector General in place.

Away we go again.

In her testimony at today's Senate hearing (.pdf), Danielle Brian from the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) recounted the situation with the State Department IG position during Obama's presidency. The position was vacant when he entered office after the former IG stepped down in the last year of Bush's presidency amid controversy.

Obama, however, was in no rush to fill that vacancy, despite concerns surrounding the acting IG. From Ms. Brian's testimony:

In 2010, POGO raised concerns about the relationship between [acting IG Howard] Geisel, a former ambassador and long-time member of the diplomatic corps, and State’s Under Secretary for Management, Patrick Kennedy. ... Despite Geisel’s assurances that his office’s work was not affected by his ties to an agency official, numerous whistleblowers from the State Department had come to POGO “due to a perception within the Department that employees with knowledge of wrongdoing cannot go to the OIG because they believe it to be captured by management.”

You know what they say - and by "they" I mean the Obama administration and by "say" I mean in hushed tones away from public consumption - Stifling Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism.

Continuing with Ms. Brian's testimony:

The Department lacked a permanent watchdog for Hillary Clinton’s entire four-year tenure as Secretary of State, the longest vacancy since the position was created in 1957.

Yes, Obama thrives on his presidency being called unprecedented.

The public is also left wondering whether an insider would have felt more comfortable blowing the whistle on the Department’s email problems if the IG’s office was headed by a permanent leader whose independence was beyond reproach.

We'll cut Obama at least a little slack here. Even had he appointed a permanent IG, it is safe to assume that person would have been more a political hack than an unrepoachable and independent leader. So let's just insert a cynical Hillarian "what difference would it have made" exclamation and MoveOn.

Once his Administration began, it took President Obama more than 1,700 days to nominate a permanent State IG—and only after Members of Congress, including this Committee, pressured the White House to act. The vacancy at the IG’s office lasted a total of 2,071 days— more than five years—before the President’s nominee, Steve A. Linick, finally took office in September 2013.

Soooooo, can we can reasonably assume that now Secretary of State John Kerry's email address ends in .gov? It's the small things that keep us going.

Ms. Bryan also referenced this Wall Street Journal piece from March, which noted that State was the only cabinet level department that had "neither a confirmed nor nominated head watchdog" during that time.

The lack of a confirmed inspector general raises questions about oversight of the department under Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton. The department has been criticized for its failure to gather and archive the email records of Mrs. Clinton and other officials and for responses to public-record requests that lawmakers and advocacy groups say were insufficient, including its response to requests for information from a congressional panel investigating the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Honestly, looked at another way, I think it answers as many questions as it raises, confirming Obama's unwillingness and weakness in providing independent oversight of the State Department on Hillary's watch.

Hillary got away with ethically troubling - and most likely outright illegal - behavior while Secretary of State when Obama was her boss (thanks, Obama).

Now just imagine what Hillary could get away with if she were elected President and effectively had no boss.

Well. You can rest assured that Hillary has spent her entire adult lifetime imagining that very thing.

June 03, 2015

Hillary 2015 continues its Eerie Reprise of Nixon 1968 - in each case the nation stared down a seemingly inevitable nominee who inspired the respect but not affection of supporters, the loathing of detractors, and was removed from and at odds with the media.

In screaming contrast to the rock star enthusiasm of Barack 2008, Getting Ready for Hillary seems to be as exciting to Democrats as getting ready for a trip to the dentist. They know they have to do it, they know they will do it eventually, but later will be fine.

Anyway, this sentence seems to reflect a bit of a self-awareness deficit on Ms. Walsh's part:

Media covering the media’s complaints about the way media is treated; what could be more Beltway-centric inside baseball?

Since she asked, let's give it a go. More Beltway-centric inside baseball is media person Joan Walsh covering the coverage of media's complaints about the way media is treated.

We not so eagerly await perhaps Howard Kurtz or Ron Fournier to cover the coverage of the coverage of the complaints. And maybe at some point, if we're really lucky, Glenn Klessler will then weigh in to tell us how much of it is fact versus mostly fact, and Dana Milbank will write an unintentionally funny piece on how all of this shows why Republicans are crazy and stupid.

Sheesh. Where will it all end? We're no longer dealing with inside baseball, we're peeling the baseball as if it were an onion. Or something. In any event, now my eyes are burning.

I don't care if the media truly does hate Hillary Clinton. It doesn't matter if they do or don't. If Hillary is the Democratic nominee in 2016, the media will fall in line.

June 02, 2015

The World Series of Poker began last week. The event has grown to gargantuan size - there were over 22,000 players in its "Colossus" tournament, and the entire event is being played over 51 days.

Shuffle up and deal!

In other news of high stakes gambling, the ongoing negotiations over Iran's nuclear program are ongoing. However, due to his bicycle accident, John Kerry has returned to Washington to nurse his broken femur.

The good news is, this will limit John Kerry's involvement in the negotiations at least to some extent. The bad news is, there really is no one in the Obama administration who would be much better.

The scary news is, what if Obama were to get more directly involved. Back in May, the New York Times wrote about the negotiations in terms of Obama's legacy:

“Right now, [Obama] has no foreign policy legacy,” said Cliff Kupchan, an Iran specialist who has been tracking the talks as chairman of the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm. “He’s got a list of foreign policy failures. A deal with Iran and the ensuing transformation of politics in the Middle East would provide one of the more robust foreign policy legacies of any recent presidencies. It’s kind of all in for Obama. He has nothing else. So for him, it’s all or nothing.”

WASHINGTON — With only one month left before a deadline to complete a nuclear deal with Iran, international inspectors have reported that Tehran’s stockpile of nuclear fuel increased about 20 percent over the last 18 months of negotiations, partially undercutting the Obama administration’s contention that the Iranian program had been “frozen” during that period.

The overall increase in Iran’s stockpile poses a major diplomatic and political challenge for President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, who flew back to the United States from Geneva on Monday for treatment of a broken leg he suffered in a bicycling accident, as they enter a 30-day push to try to complete an agreement by the end of June. In essence, the administration will have to convince Congress and America’s allies that Iran will shrink its stockpile by 96 percent in a matter of months after a deal is signed, even while it continues to produce new material and has demonstrated little success in reducing its current stockpile.

How does the administration view this problem?

Administration officials said nothing publicly about the atomic energy agency’s report. But several officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the Iranians understood that under a final agreement they would commit to giving up almost all of their fuel and maintaining a small stockpile for 15 years.

“How are they going to do it?” one senior American official said recently when asked about the negotiations, details of which Mr. Kerry and his team are trying to keep confidential. “We’re not certain. It’s their problem, not ours. But it’s a problem.”

Nonetheless, officials say they expect the radical reduction of Iran’s stockpile to happen in the opening months of any agreement, either by shipping it out of the country or changing it into a form that would make it impossible to re-enrich and use as a weapon.

It's not our problem? I'd like someone in the administration to consider it our problem - rather than blithely assert that we expect the Iranians to do something that they've shown no interest in doing. Maybe we could even work toward becoming certain how the Iranians would reduce their stockpile, and - I'm mean I'm just spitballing here - devise a program through which we could verify that the reduction actually takes place.

I'd like to ask if that would be too much to ask, but I'm afraid an honest answer from the administration would be depressing.

Well, if one were to imagine Obama going toe to toe with Iran's lead negotiator Mohammad Javad Zarif in a poker match - and pushing all in - I fear it might look something like this:

To paraphrase a favorite Instapundit line, the country's innot holding the very best of hands with this president and those in his administration in charge.

June 01, 2015

The [Clinton Foundation] disclosure says Mr. and Mrs. Clinton earned big speech fees, and the list shows Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton turning over between $12 million and $26 million. Anyone who has dealt with the IRS before might ask how it is possible for the Clintons to pick and choose which fees they hand over and which they keep, if that is indeed what is occurring.

The assignment of income doctrine has long been part of our tax law. In general, it prevents taxpayers from sending income to another person or entity. The tax law if full of examples of unsuccessful attempts to avoid income or assign claims. On the surface, it looks as though the Clintons are doing just that. For the Clintons, there may well be a legitimate way to structure their fees as they do. There is no question that they would not want to receive the speaking fees personally and then hand them over to the Foundation.

But a question of whether the Clintons have violated the law is entirely separate from "Will the IRS investigate possible violations?"

For our money, on the first question we'd suggest answering with a question with something about bears, woods and bowel movements. On the second question, "keeping hope alive is on life support" seems overly optimistic.

If the IRS looks into this–which seems unlikely–it might consider the cushy private travel and other perks that go with it. The IRS calls it private inurement when private parties–especially founders–get big salaries or other items that should be treated as income. As with the Clintons’ private email server, the line between personal benefit and the public purpose seems blurred. One thing though that is crystal clear is that Hillary Clinton is highly skilled with charities, transparency, and email.